Pet Sematary Two (1992) Directed by Mary Lambert
Oppressively downbeat like its mournful predecessor but also purposelessly wrathful, which forces the filmmakers to jettison the goofy supernatural theatrics that made Pet Sematary so gloriously awful. This is just flat-out icky, dull adolescent miserabilism.
Cinema’s grungiest teenager at the time, Edward Furlong plays the crestfallen son of a veterinarian who loses his Hollywood actress mother in a fatal on-set accident during a film shoot. He now lives away from the Hollywood cameras that idolized his mother and settles with his father in Ludlow, his mother’s hometown. These synoptic patterns are already well known to us, the new kid coming from the big city adjusting to small-town idiosyncrasies. I wish it had been just that, though, but it’s mostly an insufferable recap of Pet Sematary steeped in the ubiquitous clichés of the 80’s and 90’s teen horror film lore. The first and most exhausting of these stereotypes, that of the main character being bullied at school. The second but no less exhausting, that of the abusive stepfather being a jerk to his family. It’s a sequel about the pet sematary, but Mary Lambert’s direction feels so compelled to just rehash the same thing, that it neglects that, technically, this is still a movie about Stephen King’s tale.
The ghoulish mystique of the Pet Sematary motif is imperceptible in this follow-up because the practicality of Lambert’s style seems to act out of mere duty and not mere artistic drive. What remains is a bleak and ugly scenario, a bloated version of the fateful happenings of the first installment; only this time, the characters behave more out of anger than out of grief, thus lacking the thematic underpinnings of King’s novel. Clancy Brown playing the tyrannical stepfather recalls the overblown tawdry proportions of the first film, but it is with this particular character that the film’s script goes awry. Because the ceremonial act of burial was supposed to be motivated by the human desire to bring a loved one back to life. Clancy Brown is not a loved one in the plot, he is just the bad guy. This nullifies the mythical power behind the unnatural motivations of the indigenous burial ground that reanimates corpses but does not restore life as such, or rather invalidates the moral metaphysics of the story which is unambiguously about people unable to accept the demise of a loved one and therefore willing to reverse this despite the deadly consequences.
Pet Sematary 2 ruins the creepy but poignant premise that Pet Sematary at least had the decency to flesh out faithfully. With this film, Mary Lambert makes it crystal clear to me that she is a director of climactic events not anticipatory ones, the finale is a batshit crazy freak showstopper – she saves the best for last, just as she did in Pet Sematary – but that’s not how movies work, this is more eye-catching dramaturgy than cinema.